2018 was a year of growing pains for me and for the industry I am in. I drafted 10 lessons that I learned the hard way, which I would like to share in case someone find themselves in a similar situation as mine.

Before I start, some context. I changed roles in 2016 when I decided to take my ethnographic practice further to design new services. While this move has been organic, given that research is a constant throughout the design process and user-centric by nature, I am still grasping the complexities of business transformation.

When consulting, the consultant generally immerses in the world of the client, their customers and business' needs. This is a thorough exercise, part of the consulting trade. Something that is not always taught, however, is that the job starts with the consultant immersing themselves first in their own line of business. In the case of service design and digital transformation consultants, this is particularly relevant as they are both, observers and actors, in the transformation process.

While a consultant offers to help the clients with new perspectives and knowledge, the same consulting industry they belong to is transforming at a pace that organisations and people don't seem to catch up to fast enough. The pressure of technological change and new ways of working is a constant, which doesn't translate in immediately visible mindsets and behaviours. The reality is that organisational culture and technology just simply don't evolve at the same speed. In light of this, conflict emerges because the clients look for some guidance to navigate these forces, while the consultants try their best to quickly adapt and provide advice based on their own lessons.

In an attempt to provide hope to those who aim at changing the status quo of their industries and are genuinely trying to help their clients, here are the ten things I learned to do and not to do:

Get your stakeholders on board with your approach. Whether they paid you to do the thing that you were hired to do, don’t take this for granted and try your best to engage them and lure them with the skills and possibilities that they can learn and apply.

Speak their language and be empathetic towards their business needs. If the meaning behind a blueprint is too complex find similar terms that they can relate to while transmitting the same message. Communicating things that they understand is half the battle.

Show them your progress early on, regardless of the fidelity. By sharing your work you ensure that what you are doing is not completely off the brief, or that it will take the clients by surprise at a later stage. Unfinished artefacts should also encourage participation and co-creation.

Focus on the outcome of the project and don’t fixate on the tools or methods.Generally, I am asked to produce a number of design artefacts which show the value of my work. While these are important, there should be some goals that the design should aim at achieving, more engagement with the users, decrease in costs or waiting time, etc. Make sure that regardless of your artefacts, your work helps achieve these goals. Clients often lose sight of this and it is the consultant’s job to remind them of the outcomes that they are after.

Aim at showing the clients a new mindset by sharing your knowledge and making people curious. Enthusiasm is a key characteristic of the design process as it allows collaboration and creativity. This curiosity and joyful attitude helps your team and your client in times when the end goal looks unclear and the morale is low.

Arrive with something to conversations with clients. I have learnt this the hard way because clients like seeing things. These don’t need to be high fidelity prototypes, but they can be a well drafted hypothesis, a list of assumptions or ideas from the insights. Starting from somewhere is far easier than starting from scratch.

Stand firmly by your process. If you follow a methodology that has worked for you in the past, trust this to be a foundation to help you solve a current problem.

At the same time, be flexible and adapt if the strict methodology doesn’t work every time. Use the elements that do work and adapt the rest.

Show that you have a vision, communicate this to the client and more importantly to your own leadership. Clients don’t always see things clearly from where they stand, if you do, try to communicate that there is a rationale behind your design decisions. Let them know that these are not random, creative sparks of your imagination. Know that if your arguments don't align to their vision, it will be a hard battle.

Be close with your own team and your company's leadership. The closer you are to everyone who makes your job possible the better. The myth of the creative genius is long gone and you are as successful as those around you. Leverage on different skills than yours and learn, share what you know humbly and hope that everyone finds a common north to strive for.

This piece is part of a series of interviews I will be conducting with colleagues of mine who lead design teams through organisational change all over the world.

My goal is to draw attention to, what I consider, the most important problem organisations should solve right now. One that needs addressing more urgently than building a design capability and adopting agile, or lean methodologies

This problem originates in the human quality of resisting change, yet having to adapt to it quickly. With industries evolving, some jobs disappearing, new skill sets emerging and millenials contesting the 9–5 model of working, organisations need to embed a growth mindset instead of a fixed one .

Sadly, due to our reactive human nature, the majority of organisations go straight into the end solution to their problems, ignoring that the first step towards success is the set up and not the shinny thing that people see as an outcome.

This is the problem I want to solve. How can leaders help their teams transition into organisational change more easily? In other words, how can teams organise themselves for growth and change?

Service design for organisational change in Indonesia

Nurul is a bright service designer who studied with me at Hyper Island.

After trying to promote and establish a service design practice with different NGOs in Indonesia, she found herself joining a travel booking company as a design strategist/service designer.

She is now responsible for a team of 22 designers and here is what she shared with me about her experience:

What was your journey into leading a team?

I entered this role by accident. I was approached by a company who was looking for a lead design strategist. I didn’t know this was going to be a lead role or that I was going to lead a 22 people team.

I was curious and interested in the concept and in working on different product propositions. I was keen to do it when they explained the role to me, especially because I wanted to help asian citizens to do design.

What keeps you busy in your day to day?

I work together with a team of designers, engineers and stakeholders to create and launch end to end products. This company is 6 years old and 2000 people work here. The company’s core business is travel but they also do different things such as flights bookings, providing information about products, hospitality and vacation products.

I am responsible to create experiences across platforms including the launch of features that enhance services.

What was your main challenge?

When I came in there was no structure, the company was undergoing a transition to launch new products and that’s why they re-organised the teams. I handled payment facilities and there were a lot of changes in the organisation. People didn’t know where they were going to be, or what role would they end up doing. I was not sure how I was going to solve this.

I started by chasing everybody and getting contacts in the organisation. I was in the middle of things happening, so I didn’t understand where to begin in the project. I had to get more context from everybody, for instance, how to work with people across teams including the designers and the developers, but people would tell me different things. It took me 4 months to start making sense of the situation. It did not happen immediately.

How did you resolve it?

I don’t know if I resolved it. I had to adapt every day. I started with trying to decide where I was going and I focused on that. The leadership had different expectations of me, though. I saw myself pushing for aligning and co-designing with the intention of open collaboration but not everyone preferred it, as they wanted to see a design outcome quickly.

I finally decided what to focus on, so I focused on leading. I had to start with the knowledge I had learnt in my Masters degree and I became part of the team and collaborated with them.

What secret weapons did you use?

In order to gather the whole context and convince everyone in a short time and educate them on user experience, I did the following:

Convinced people by doing

I created solutions with no testing because I had to show them and they had to see what I was talking about. I was sure no one would be convinced of the ideas otherwise. Different stakeholders are different. For instance, engineers want practical examples and clear UI.

Guerrilla validation due to lack of testing

I opened literature reviews, books and validated in my own way for the sake of convincing the other teams and the stakeholders.

I learned that there wasn’t an intro to how design could resolve business problems.

What do you wish you had known?

I wish I had aligned expectations. The design strategist’s role didn’t align with the responsibilities that leading all this entailed. In retrospect, that was a risk as I didn’t have that much experience leading big teams.

I was also a bit overoptimistic. I walked in here wanting to win hearts with convictions about design and things that I had learnt at school. For instance, I prototyped things that weren’t tested and after we tested them we discovered many things were wrong.

I led the team. I treated them very collaboratively at the beginning and this ended up not being what they needed. Instead, they needed more guidance and to be told what to do since a lot of them were very junior.

I learned along the way that I had to adapt to this. I decided to organise a process about what we will do today, tomorrow, next month or week. I organised this in a system when I realised they couldn’t, or didn’t want to collaborate.

What support did you receive from the leadership?

There was a clash of expectations that impacted the team’s management. I also lacked support and a safe space to share the issues I was facing.

What was your biggest learning?

At the beginning I wanted everyone to have a good environment and create cool things and have a good working culture but I had to let that go.

I couldn’t apply the team collaboration techniques that we learnt at school because that wasn’t what was needed at the time. Instead, I had to be firm and anchor what I felt intuitively was most needed, such as training the team on some basic principles of human centered design.

I focused on how to fail fast and try something else quickly when something doesn’t work. I wish I could have taught them this before. Some of them were too critical and they were worried that their solutions were wrong.

I learnt to step back. There were generational differences between my peers. For instance, there is a difference with my generation as we push for what we want. The new generation is not the same. There is a mindset of not being good enough, so this requires close guidance and not being so pushy as a leader.

What was the outcome of your efforts?

I was surprised that people adapted to the change. In general, people benefitted from it. People who had a background on design research used what they learned to improve although 2 people resigned. The change was too overwhelming for them. Perhaps their expectations were to have a peaceful day to day.

The main metric of success was in terms of applying design to the deliverables. We had metrics for how users use the services and the features. We shifted teams. We talked to users again and listened to their experience of the changes and included this into our design process.

Last thoughts

I have noticed that some people probably have a mindset to adapt. What I noticed was that there was a mix in my team’s thinking. Some wanted to convince themselves and the decision-makers to maintain their position. They had been doing the same for years and were in denial. They wanted to carry on developing, doing what they were doing while some others were preparing for what was going to happen. And some others prepared themselves for uncertainty.

My main realisation has been that people themselves are the design, not only the products or services that they make.

What may seem as a gap in my CV for some, or a bold move for others, was the outcome of a well-thought process which started a couple of years ago. This piece is an opportunity to talk about the number of steps that led me here.

Processing stuff after feeling pain

Making a life in a place takes time. From finding a job, or getting enough clients, to having a strong network of friends and a support system, a home, and the comfort that comes with settling in. It took me a while to achieve what I wanted to in what became my second home: South Africa. It wasn’t always easy to do it either. It was lonely some times because of different reasons, not only because when I chose the life I had for 12 years I also left the people I loved the most somewhere else, but because finding those who deserve one’s love is rare. While I was focused on doing something that I would be proud of, and building a career in a different country, in another continent, I sometimes forgot why I was doing it all.

I eventually reached the milestones I figured would make my life easier such as owning a house, and the friends and people I loved were there to hold me at the hardest. When I thought things were stable and life finally resembled what I had envisaged, I had to deal with challenges that made me question the achievements. I revised the things, the security, and even myself. Up until that point I had been going for years in automatic pilot, because it was necessary in order to survive, without stopping to think about what I dreamt about and review if it was still worth pursuing. I felt devastated, hopeless, as if a part of me where trust in others resides was never going to be the same again. I also felt that I owed it to myself to pursue at least one of the dreams I had.

All the roads that led me here became one

In my experience every time I have tried to control something external to me, the more pressure I put the more life unfolds however it wants to, as if it did it on purpose, just so that I see that clinging does not mean closeness, but mere attachment. So even with me wanting to disappear from Johannesburg when everything collapsed, I could only do so when I allowed life show me the right time, but also when I felt ready.

I always wanted to live somewhere new, start from scratch and prove to myself one more time that I could make it, and be a good anthropologist regardless of the context. The opportunity was never clear and other than regular visits to a very close friend in Europe, the possibility of doing that was just a vision, but nothing concrete.

I looked for work but quickly realised the move had to be more evident and bold. I had a few conversations, asked some questions, and had some ideas in my head of furthering my knowledge. It was then when I heard of HyperIsland, the school I currently go to. It seemed to me that studying was an opportunity to set the change I wanted so much in motion, while also opening myself up to new learnings in my discipline. I will be writing about that soon, perhaps less personally.

Changing the course of things is not easy but necessary

I am into my third week of the studies. I switched my course as well, a decision that was founded in what I want to do with my career, the range of experience I have, and the things that align the most with my interests. I am not sure where I’ll be in 6 months time. I sold my car, I rented out my flat, I don’t have a job, or a significant other to go back to. I can write my story from scratch if so I want to, or return to the life I had, perhaps to improve it or change it significantly. I can choose to continue learning, and I must know that regardless of my choices I don’t control life and what happens in it, except for my ability to make some decisions.

I give up clinging onto the past. I am here because of it, it set change in motion, it made me pursue dreams again, and aspire to a better me. It may not be the easiest choice, but it’s the more liberating one and I trust the most rewarding one.

I thought I should write something about my trip to Angola since it was a rich Anthropological experience in my life.

I arrived to the airport hoping to find the person who was going to fetch me, yet, there I was waiting next to 2 other scared-looking white guys, who were also looking for their drivers, and seemed as anxious as I was (eventually all our drivers arrived after 45 minutes).

I was nervous because I got a lot of warnings about the place, especially in regards to malaria, the mosquitoes, the corruption, the not walking alone in the street, the underdevelopment, and the unhealthy water.

I have been here 6 days now, and from what I've seen, yes, all of the above are true, but not in a conventional way.